It's back to the drawing board for Forest City Enterprises Inc. and its proposal to build 246,000 square feet of lab and office space in Cambridge, Mass.The Cambridge Chroniclereports that Cambridge City Council on Monday night allowed Forest City's petition to expire, “effectively rejecting their proposal” to build the lab and office space near the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology “while still allowing them to return with an alternate proposal.”In the end, “it all came down to affordable housing,” according to The Chronicle.Council members determined the project as proposed “could threaten some of the 168 affordable housing units spread throughout University Park,” according to this story from the Boston Business Journal.University Park is a joint project of Forest City, MIT and the city of Cambridge. The Business Journal says Forest City “agreed in 1988 to maintain affordable housing units on the site for at least 30 years. That agreement only recently came to light.”Peter Calkins, chief operating officer of Forest City Boston, told The Chronicle he was “disappointed” that the proposal was not approved, but said it was “better than the alternative of a 'no' vote.”As to whether the company will return in the fall with a revised proposal, Mr. Calkins said, “We're going to have to look at that. We thought we had reached some pretty benefits and pretty good proposals, but we'll have to come back and evaluate it.”This and thatAnybody home?: Vacancies “are one of the best measures of how the housing market is really doing,” according to this Forbes.com piece by the chief economist of housing data company Trulia Inc.,, and by those measures, Akron and Cleveland aren't doing so great.“Vacant homes depress neighborhood home values and discourage new construction,” writes Trulia's Jed Kolko.“During the housing bubble, new home construction ran ahead of demand: there were more new homes than people to live in them, and some stayed vacant,” Mr. Kolko writes. “As prices dropped and foreclosures rose, people lost or left homes they couldn't afford, creating more vacant homes. Then, construction nearly stopped. Since then, it's remained below normal levels and way below bubble levels. As a result, the vacancy rate has been moving back down toward normal.”From mid-July 2011 to mid-July 2012, vacancies declined in 90 of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, according to the Trulia data. Akron, though, was one of the markets where vacancy rose; vacancy in that market now stands at 4.5%.Vacancy fell in Cleveland but remains at 6.2%, the eighth-highest rate in the country. The worst vacancy is in Detroit, where a stunning 12.1% of housing are not occupied.

Up to speed: Cleveland makes this list from Bicycling magazine of five “up-and-coming bike cities.”What does the magazine love about Cleveland?“For starters, the stretch of bike lane that now runs the length of historic Euclid Avenue, linking the city's two employment hubs,” according to the story. “A new towpath just beyond Cleveland's southern border reaches Akron — 80 miles away. Plans call for webs of bike paths to unspool east and west as well. To lure tourists in, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance launched a bike-rental program last summer — it will expand this year into a parking garage with showers and lockers.”A new velodrome is about to open, the huge Ray's Indoor Mountain Bike Park wins national acclaim and mountain bike advocates are lobbying for access to Cuyahoga Valley National Park."It would be a huge, huge step for mountain biking nationally," says Lois Moss, founder of Walk+Roll Cleveland.

Tells us something we don't know:The Wall Street Journal piles on the misery for Cleveland Indians fans with this statistical breakdown of the team's 10-8 loss on Sunday to the Detroit Tigers.From the story:Given that Cleveland led 8-5…in the bottom of the 10th inning…with two outs and nobody on base, the Indians' meltdown was one of the most gut-wrenching losses any team has suffered all year.Based on historical data from similar situations, teams in Cleveland's position — three-run lead, bases empty, one out from victory behind their closer — win 99.5% of the time. And since Indians closer Chris Perez had held batters to a .250 on-base percentage this season, the odds of the Tigers scoring four runs without recording an out were almost nil. As it turns out, they scored five.In terms of improbable losses, “only two games this season have ranked as worse collapses,” the paper notes. Those were games in which both the Boston Red Sox and Washington Nationals blew 9-0 leads and lost.“In both situations, though, the comebacks involved chipping away at a large lead over several innings,” The Journal says. “The Indians took a game they would have won 995 times out of 1,000 and gave it away in nine minutes.”